As you might have heard, Bill Simmons finally scored an interview with Barack Obama this week. Now, we at Deadspin are obviously part of the Giant Liberal Gay Media Deathship, but that doesn't mean we can't at least try to strive for balance on occasion. That's why, as a favor to all the remaining GOP candidates, we'd like to present the following list of talking points you can use to assault the president for his decision to confer with the Sports Fella:

I flew to San Fran to hang out with my buddies Bish, Mikey and Hopper (the heart of the original Vegas crew) for a few days. The weekend started off with Mikey showing us a then-legendary porn scene—one where Rocco Siffredi randomly decided to dunk a co-star's head into a toilet—which we analyzed like it was the Zapruder film for a good two to 10 hours. Then we flew to Vegas and gambled for three straight days, and every time someone got killed by a blackjack hand we made a variation of a joke about someone getting their head rammed in the toilet by Rocco. Vegas is the place where you beat the same joke into the ground, but this went to another level—flushing sounds, gurgling, "No, no Rocco, not again!" and everything else. It just never got old.

Last summer, at my buddy Hopper's bachelor party, we played blackjack at Mandalay Bay until 8:45 a.m., one of those blurry marathons where you wake up the following afternoon, heave a sigh of relief when you see your wallet ("I didn't lose it!") then scream happily when you glimpse the wad of hundreds inside. Women had flirted with us, pit bosses had sauntered over to "cool" us down. We hadn't played for 25 G's a hand, but we had risked a higher percentage of our net worth than MJ did in his Mohegan cameo, that's for sure. It was my single best run in Vegas—and I didn't have Leahy standing nearby jotting down unflattering notes.

Kudos to reader Ben Bernetson for mentioning Reggie Cleveland as the best possible example of my "you think a random baseball player is black and they turn out to be white, or vice versa" phenomenon (described in the last Ramblings, about Sidney Ponson and Marcus Giles). That e-mail prompted me to rename the list "The Reggie Cleveland Group." Some other examples sent in by readers: Ricky Proehl, Shavlik Randolph, Herbert Perry, Tony Massenburg, Trot Nixon, Brooks Robinson, Johnny Damon, Harmon Killebrew, Darin Erstad, Jarrod Washburn, and, of course, Troy O'Leary.

Anyway, here's a list of my favorite quotes. Some of them probably won't work for a high school yearbook, but I'm trotting them out just because...

"In the poker game of life, women are the rake. They are the (expletive) rake."
— Lester "Worm" Murphy"

I needed permission from my pregnant wife, who was perpetually ornery from (a) carrying our second child during the hot weather months in California, and (b) being knocked up because I pulled the goalie on her back in February.

[...]

The term "pulling the goalie" means "eschewing birth control and letting the chips fall where they may." Usually couples discuss pulling the goalie before it happens… unless it's Bridget Moynahan. In my case, I made the executive decision to speed up plans for kid number two. This did not go over well. I think I'm the first person who ever had a home pregnancy test whipped at them at 95 mph. In my defense, I'm getting old and wanted to have a second kid before I wouldn't be able to have a catch with them anymore. I have no regrets. Plus, we had a son. In the words of Joel Goodson, sometimes you gotta say, "What the fuck?"